Valve expands upon their plans for hardware, with Gabe Newell telling Kotaku they hope to begin selling appliance-style PCs next year to provide a turnkey way to play Steam games in the living room using the service's new Big Picture Mode. He explains this will help to unify two oddly defined environments:

"I think in general that most customers and most developers are gonna find that [the PC is] a better environment for them," Newell told me. "Cause they won't have to split the world into thinking about 'why are my friends in the living room, why are my video sources in the living room different from everyone else?' So in a sense we hopefully are gonna unify those environments."

Newell said he's expecting a lot of different companies to release these types of packages—"We'll do it but we also think other people will as well," he told me—and that Valve's hardware might not be as open-source or as malleable as your average computer.

"Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment," he said. "If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that's what some people are really gonna want for their living room.

Beamer wrote on Dec 10, 2012, 11:39:So, no one else thinks this is a big step towards Steam offering TV and movies?

The more pertinent question is: Is that something to get excited over? You can get TV and movies over just about everything nowadays. So maybe in a year you'll have Yet Another Thing That Gives You TV And Movies?